Background
Frank Norris was born on March 5, 1870, in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was a son of Benjamin Franklin Norris, jewelry and real estate businessman, and Gertrude Glorvina Norris (maiden name Doggett), a stage actress.
Academie Julian where Frank Norris studied art under Guillaume Bouguereau.
University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States
The University of California, Berkeley where Frank Norris studied from 1890 to 1894.
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Harvard University where Frank Norris studied from 1894 to 1895.
(This classic literary critique of turn-of-the-century cap...)
This classic literary critique of turn-of-the-century capitalism in the United States reveals Norris's powerful story of an obsessed trader intent on cornering the wheat market and the consequences of his unchecked greed.
https://www.amazon.com/Pit-Story-Chicago-Epic-Wheat/dp/0140187588/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=The+Pit%3A+A+Story+of+Chicago&qid=1580914113&s=books&sr=1-2
1903
(The volume contains three books by Frank Norris, The Thir...)
The volume contains three books by Frank Norris, The Third Circle, A Man's Woman & McTeague, and A Story of San Francisco.
https://www.amazon.com/Third-Circle-Frank-Norris-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B00VIQL5BI/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=The+Third+Circle+Frank+Norris&qid=1580914545&s=books&sr=1-2
1909
critic journalist novelist writer poet
Frank Norris was born on March 5, 1870, in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was a son of Benjamin Franklin Norris, jewelry and real estate businessman, and Gertrude Glorvina Norris (maiden name Doggett), a stage actress.
Frank Norris moved with his family to San Francisco, where his father entered into real estate development while retaining his successful jewelry business, at the age of fourteen. He was educated in private schools, including Belmont Academy and the Boys' High School in San Francisco, and his mother shared with him her love of poetry and art.
In 1887, entertaining ambitions to become a painter, Norris remained in Paris following a family tour abroad and enrolled in the Atelier Julian art school where he was taught by Guillaume Bouguereau. While in Paris, he began writing, sending installments of a medieval romance to his younger brother, Charles, at home in California. The first article by Norris was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1889.
A year later, Frank Norris returned to the United States and entered the University of California, Berkeley at his father's insistence as a special student having not enough knowledge to meet the mathematics requirement.
Although Norris entered the university against his will and later considered his education practically useless, the experience which he gained during his four years at the University of California is considered pivotal to the maturation of his writing. While at the University, more interested in the liberal arts, Norris took an active part in the local campus magazines and theater productions. It was there where he discovered the writings of Émile Zola, a well-known representative of Naturalism, which had a great impact on his further works. Frank Norris left the University of California in 1894 without a degree.
That same year, Norris entered Harvard University again as a special student, this time in English and French. Under the direction of professor Lewis Gates, Norris cultivated an affinity for the works of Zola and began to base his own fiction on a more realistic foundation than he had previously considered. After a year of studies, Norris returned to San Francisco.
Frank Norris’s first romantic narrative poem Yvernelle: A Legend of Feudal France, that he wrote while in his freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley, was published in a book form in 1892 by Lippincott.
By that time, Norris had lost his youthful interest in purely romantic literature and soon began to use more realistic subject matter in his writing. He began his next novel, McTeague soon after he left the University of California, and continued to work on it, as well as on another novel, Vandover and the Brute, during 1894-1895, the period he spent at Harvard University.
In 1895, Frank Norris returned to San Francisco first earning his living by editing and contributing small articles to various periodicals. In order to receive the knowledge necessary to create something truly meaningful, he traveled to Africa as a war correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1895. A tropical fever and some problems with the local authorities forced Norris to return to San Francisco the following year with only one article published in a national magazine and without fame he aspired to obtain.
Upon his return to the United States, Frank Norris found a job of a copywriter and editorial assistant at the local newspaper the Wave. He produced short stories of everyday local life, literary reviews, interviews, and led a small column about football for the periodical. During this time, he also finished McTeague for which he couldn't find a publisher because of its brutal realism.
He then created a more conventional story, the adventure Moran of the Lady Letty: A Story of Adventure off the California Coast, that was serialized in 1898 by the Wave and by the S. S. McClure syndicate in New York City. The novel caught the attention of S. S. McClure himself, who hired Norris as a journalist for McClure's magazine and as a reader for the Doubleday and McClure Company. Moran of the Lady Letty, McTeague, and Norris's next novel, Blix, a semi-autobiographical love story, were all subsequently published in a book form by Doubleday.
In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, Frank Norris had a work trip to Cuba as a war correspondent for McClure's Magazine.
Early in 1899, Frank Norris conceived of the idea of an "epic of wheat" the first volume of which would be devoted to the production of wheat in California, the second to its distribution in Chicago, and the third to its consumption in Europe. It was, as he wrote, "an idea as big as all outdoors," an attempt to portray in a single, massive work the various social milieux of the United States. He completed the first volume of the series, The Octopus: A Story of California, in 1901, and finished writing the second, The Pit: A Story of Chicago, in 1902. The Wolf, the third volume of the trilogy, was never completed.
Volumes of Norris's short stories and essays were published after his death, including the early novel Vandover and the Brute, the manuscript of which was believed to have been lost in a San Francisco earthquake. The publication of the novel in 1914 viewed as largely autobiographical was met with a mixed response.
Among other volumes of Norris's works published after his death are the short story collection A Deal in Wheat, and Other Stories of the New and Old West, The Responsibilities of the Novelist, and Other Literary Essays, the novel The Joyous Miracle, and The Third Circle. This final volume contains Norris's magazine contributions written between 1891 and 1902.
(This classic literary critique of turn-of-the-century cap...)
1903(A lesser-known American classic, the book explores the da...)
1892(The volume contains three books by Frank Norris, The Thir...)
1909(A stunning novel of the waning days of the frontier West.)
1901Several scholars, including Donald Pizer, detected racism, antisemitism, and the sneering attitude to the immigrants and poor people from the working class in the works of Frank Norris.
Quotations:
"The novel with a purpose brings the tragedies and griefs of others to notice and proves that injustice, crime, and inequality do exist."
"The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it."
"Truth is a thing immortal and perpetual, and it gives to us a beauty that fades not away in time."
"The People have a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
"No art that is not in the end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single generation."
"Evil is short lived. Never judge of the whole round of life by the mere segment you can see. The whole is, in the end, perfect."
Frank Norris was a member of the Fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta while studying at the University of California, Berkeley. He was also among the founders of the University's Skull & Keys society.
Frank Norris's McTeague shocked much of its original audience with its frank and graphic depictions of violence and degradation, and other commentators complained of the melodramatic conclusion. While admitting that some readers would judge its subject unpleasant and its central characters contemptible, John D. Barry, writing in a review in Literary World, remarked that "every figure is perfectly realized; every episode has its significance." Continuing, Barry called the work a "volume which seems to me worthy to rank among the few great novels produced in this country," and he accorded high praise to "its profound insight into character; its shrewd humor; its brilliant massing of significant detail, and […] its dramatic force."
Writing in 1911, the critic Frederic Taber Cooper asserted that "McTeague does not begin to show the breadth of purpose or the technical skill of The Octopus or The Pit; yet there are times when one is tempted to award it a higher place for all-around excellence. There is a better balance between the central theme and the individual characters, – or to state it differently, between the underlying ethics and the so-called human interest. If Norris had never written another book, he would still have lived in McTeague."
Physical Characteristics: Frank Norris died of peritonitis three years after an operation for appendicitis.
Quotes from others about the person
"Norris believed that human behavior could largely be understood in terms of the impact of heredity, environment, and the pressure of circumstance, and that free will or the ability to make choices was limited. What also interested him, in turn, was how such beliefs might affect individuals and/or how such theories might be enlisted to account for the abnormal or pathological in human behavior." Karen F. Jacobson
"What Norris has done in McTeague is to preserve the physical characteristics of an important era in human affairs – the period immediately before the electrification of the city established the distinctive quality of twentieth-century domestic life." John Dudley, literary critic
"His inside knowledge of the leisure class.… made it possible for him to escape the effects of the kind of impoverished childhood suffered by many 'realistic' and 'naturalistic' novelists who could not speak without envy or rancor of conditions Norris took for granted. While many writers have studied this Society, few have been able to give an intimate insight into the raw, unsophisticated ruthlessness that motivated 'conspicuous consumption." Warren French
Frank Norris married Jeanette Black on February 12, 1899. The family produced a daughter Jeannette Williamson.
Norris had also a son named Charles Norris.